Search help

You can start a simple search by typing keywords in to the ‘Search Term’ field. If you type multiple words into this field, search results will show either 1 or more of your keywords.

To narrow your search to an exact phrase, enclose your keywords in quotation marks, eg “signal transduction”.

You can also search our journals by

• Exact citation: enter the year, volume and starting page number or article ID number in the appropriate fields under the Citation heading
• Partial citation: if you know the starting page number or article ID, enter it in the First Page field
• Title: full titles, or fragments, should be entered in "quotation marks"
• Author: characters not falling in the English A-Z alphabet should be replaced with a wildcard character (*). The author’s last name is the main identifier
• Keywords: keywords can either be searched in the Title/Abstract, the Bibliography or anywhere in the article (which includes the title/abstract). Single letters and common words (eg ‘the’) cannot be searched
• Date Ranges: limit your search results by year of publication, or limit the search results to articles for which the full text is available on-line by using the starting date for full-text availability
• DOI: a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is a unique alphanumeric identifier applied to a specific piece of intellectual property, particularly 1 presented online. Enter a complete DOI to return an exact match; partial DOIs and wildcards do not work here.
• Articles from a particular institution: authors' addresses and affiliations are indexed and can be searched using the Full Text field
• Articles that cite a paper written by a certain author: search for the author's last name in the Bibliography field
• Journals, Subject Collections: limit your search results to 1 or more journals or subject collections by selecting your chosen journals and fields from the drop-down lists provided
• Open Access articles: limit your search results to open access articles only by checking the tick box.

Stemming

The search mechanism uses stemming to find similar words. For example, a search on

“transcription”

may turn up articles containing similar words such as transcript and transcribed. If you wish to disable stemming, enclose each individual keyword in quotation marks.

Wildcards

The wildcard character (*) can be used to search the beginning fragments of words, forcing a match with any word containing a given root. For example, a search for

“child*”

will return articles containing “child”, “childcare”, and “children”; likewise, a search for

“phospha*”

will return articles containing “phosphatase” and “phosphate”.

Wildcards can also be used to truncate words before non-English characters such as an umlaut (ü) or an accent (é).